with another 20 or so dams to be built as part of the system.
In 1936 Roosevelt signed legislation creating the Rural Electrification Administration. It provided loans to rural cooperatives, which built transmission and distribution lines to isolated farms across America that, until then, had had to depend upon kerosene lamps for their light and exhausting labor for their power. Some of the co-ops also went into electricity generation.
Other legislation established marketing authorities that gave preference to rural cooperatives and municipals for the power generated by the big new federal dams, like Bonneville and Grand Coulee in the northwest, and the Hoover Dam on the Colorado. The REA and the cooperatives that worked with it transformed the life of rural America.
“LIVE BETTER ELECTRICALLY”
The 1950s and 1960s were the years in which America really became an electrified society. With the end of World War II, millions of U.S. soldiers returned home. Rising marriage and birth rates, combined with the G.I. Bill that made it easier for veterans to purchase homes, led to a surge in demand for new houses. A great suburban house-building movement rolled out from the cities, with more than 13 million new homes built in the United States between 1945 and 1954—and with electricity playing an increasingly important role in the American home and American life. During the postwar years of the 1950s, U.S. electricity demand grew at an astounding annual rate of 10 percent (compared with about 1 percent in recent years) as more and more uses were found for electricity in homes, offices, and factories.25
Nothing so much captured the build-out of electricity in the postwar era as General Electric’s “Live Better Electrically” campaign, launched in the mid-1950s and supported by 300 utilities. But such a campaign needed a spokesman, indeed a national champion. It turned toward Hollywood.
In the early 1950s, Ronald Reagan’s movie career was not going all that well. Yes, he was a well-known screen actor, but not quite a top leading man. As president of the Screen Actors Guild, the actors union, he had certainly honed his political skills behind the scenes, but that had done nothing to advance his presence on the silver screen. He and his wife Nancy had a baby at home, but no scripts or paychecks were coming into the house. Finally, his agent landed him a job at the Last Frontier Hotel in Las Vegas, doing stand-up comedy and opening for a singing group called the Continentals. Though Reagan protested that he neither sang nor danced, the money was good, and the two-week show was sold out, but he found the work boring, and he and Nancy had no interest in the gaming tables. This was not why he had become an actor.
Then his agent called with a more interesting offer: to host a proposed television series called GE Theater and become the roving ambassador for General Electric. The pay was very good—$125,000 a year ($1 million in today’s money). He took it. Over the next eight years he spent a great deal of time on the road—the equivalent of two years—visiting 135 GE plants around the country, giving speeches, and meeting 250,000 GE workers. The time away from home was lengthened by his contract, which permitted him to avoid airplanes and crisscross the country only by train and car because of his fear of flying. (As he wrote to a friend in 1955, “I am one of those prehistoric people who won’t fly.”) In the course of those years on the road for GE, he developed “the speech”—the thematic amalgam of patriotism, American values, criticism of big government and regulation, and anecdotes and affable good humor—that would launch him into the governorship of California and then onto the presidency. But that was all in the future. In the meantime, GE Theater, with Ronald Reagan at the helm, became one of the top-rated shows on Sunday night.26
General Electric also turned the Reagan home in the Pacific Palisades section of Los Angeles into a stunning showcase for the all-electric home—“the most electric house in the country,” Reagan called it. “We found ourselves with more refrigerators, ovens and fancy lights than we could use,” Nancy Reagan said. GE kept finding new appliances to deliver—a color television, a refrigerated wine cellar, and an amazing new innovation, an electric garbage disposal. So great was the extra electric load that it had to be accommodated with additional wiring and a three-thousand-pound steel cabinet on the side of the house. Reagan would joke that they had